In this thesis different architectures of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and their suitability for object recognition were investigated by using the example of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

First, basic principles for artificial neural networks and the components of CNNs, such as convolutional layers, are introduced and explained, followed by explanations of the used data sets and the associated difficulties. We then present libraries for the concrete implementation and use of artificial neural networks and describe the sequence of the evaluation of object recognition.

The CNNs were trained and evaluated with different numbers of classes and the associated number of images. The experiments are divided by the three used training methods. For the first, the CNNs were trained with the help of autoencoders. For the second, the CNNs were trained block-wise, and for the third deeper network architectures were investigated. Various network architectures such as Residual Networks (ResNet) and Densely Connected Convolutional Networks, described in the literature, were implemented and evaluated.

The results of the experiments show that it is possible to train CNNs with up to 69 convolutional layers, to classify about 6500 different Egyptian hieroglyphs and finally to carry out an object recognition with very good results. The best results for object detection 0.92362 were achieved for a CNN with 6465 classes and 13 convolutional layers.